Politicians have incredible information retention.

Articulate: Clarke Carlisle made an impressive debut on Question Time Photo: EA

7:15AM GMT 24 Jan 2011

No matter what is thrown at them, they have all the figures and quotes, ready to throw straight back at you. And the job they do is always going to be tough. Whatever political stance you have – whatever notion or principle you hold – two out of three people are always going to oppose you.

Which is why it took a special kind of courage for Burnley defender Clarke Carlisle to go on television and tell millions of us what he thought. Footballers are trained, drilled and implored to tell us nothing.

The idea of footballers contributing to the political discourse is as unthinkable as George Osborne pulling on a pair of shorts and signing for Real Madrid.

On Thursday night's Question Time, though, that is what Carlisle did. Traditionally, the 'voice of the people' seat has been something of a poisoned chalice, where celebrities such as Carol Vorderman and Davina McCall discredit themselves by prefacing every contribution with the words "I don't really know the facts, but as a mother …" But this time, something strange happened. Carlisle, the erudite chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association and former Countdown contestant, opened his mouth, and nothing but sense came out of it – sense, enriched with a good slug of football metaphors.

"In my experience," Carlisle reflected in response to a question on the shadow cabinet, "the most successful teams are the ones that have every worker pulling in the same direction." Later, he likened NHS middle management to "putting a director of football in to control player acquisitions".

When it came to the Chilcott Inquiry, Carlisle evoked his cousin Tyson in the armed forces, "fighting for queen and country". It was the consummate performance; far more assured, at any rate, than anything he produced last season when Burnley were conceding 82 goals on their way back to the Championship.

If only his fellow panellists – prim Tory lady, Lib Dem windbag, left-wing crackpot and Alastair Campbell, best known for playing Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It – had been possessed of a similar gift for analogy. Coalition cuts? Nobody likes getting dropped, but the gaffer can only play 11 players.

Trident? You'll always struggle to get out of this division without a proven strike force. As for the Iraq War – everyone knows that a bad 45 minutes can ruin an entire campaign.

But for the vast majority of the programme Carlisle sat silently and pensively in his chair. He didn't need to get bogged down in mud-slinging.

Because, as we've already established, Clarke Carlisle is right about everything. The other members of the panel were simply quibbling over varying degrees of wrongness.

Perhaps this might persuade people that footballers are not quite as polystyrene-headed as they seem. But to hold up Carlisle's intellectual sure-footedness as representative of his fellow professionals is a little like using Jesus as proof of the intrinsic virtue of carpentry.

In the week when it was revealed that Stoke City's Jermaine Pennant once parked his Porsche at Zaragoza train station, and then forgot about it when he emigrated, and the month when Botafogo midfielder Somalia tried to explain the fact that he was late for training by falsely claiming he had been kidnapped at gunpoint, let us not forget the kind of people we're dealing with here.

No, Carlisle's magnificence stands as a tribute to himself alone. The world is far too vast and bewildering and complex for us to form an opinion on everything. Instead, we spend our lives searching for that one special person, whose Weltanschauung is so complete and so perfect that you can simply super-impose it on your own and bathe in its faultlessness. In Carlisle, I believe I may have found that person.

In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby argues that football fans regard their teams as extensions of their selves. My relationship with Carlisle runs along similar lines. In the future, Carlisle shall be my avatar, my spokesman, my Wikipedia. What he knows is sacrosanct; what he does not was probably not worth knowing in the first place.

All very well, you may argue. Carlisle may have the right motives, but does he have the eloquence to communicate his convictions to a mass audience? In fact, Carlisle may well be a good deal more articulate than you think. See that opening paragraph? They weren't my words. They were his.